With 100% English Ancestry, I thought it might be really difficult to trace my ancestors back in England from Canada. Only my mother, her father and his mother were born in Canada. This Blog will talk about researching my English ancestors from Canada but also the ancestors of our son in law whose families stretch back far into Colonial French Canada. My one name study of Blake and of Pincombe also dominate my blog these days.

Sunday, November 9, 2008

Results of Research at Salt Lake City - 9 Nov 2008

I had thought this blog might run out of thoughts by the end of my recitation of my week at Salt Lake City. However, as I worked through all the information that I brought back I will share my organization of the information online.

My first item to work on was the West Hampshire Subsidy Returns. I extracted my family name and was pleased to see the names quickly fall into the two family lines that are known to exist in this area. I was also surprised to see that they were totally concentrated in the Andover area. Although published records do claim that this family originated in Wiltshire and that one family line moved to the Andover area in just one generation, I am still looking for clues to this claim. I am gradually gathering all the evidence and must admit that with each new source I am finding that the published literature is substantiated by the records. This was an excel chart (I use excel quite a bit and access if I want to combine items and do queries) that I produced and I then went back in and extracted a couple of other family lines that are also mine in this area. I will continue to do that as my family in this area goes back to the late 1400s with the birth of my direct ancestor purportedly said to be 1489 at Eastontown ( a small property now included within the City of Andover). Hence I have ten family lines to extract with my grandmothers in each generation who are known by me thus far.

I had copied the Poor Law Records for my parishes in Devon and there are still more that I will do another time. I started by photographing 1780 for one particular parish when they begin and continued with that through to 1785. At this point I realized that I may not be able to accomplish everything if I am too thorough in collecting results. So I skipped ahead a few years and collected another ten years worth bringing me up to 1829. When I want to transcribe this information, I set up an excel file with all the titles across the page including a numerical reference (1, 2, 3, ...) and the year plus Owner, Occupier (broken into prefix, forename, surname, suffix), then name of property, and the rate broken down into pounds, shillings and pence. Especially having the rate was handy when the images were not as clear as they should be and this was a learning curve for me so some of my images were a bit blurry at the beginning. I realized after typing in the first year that I would be able to use that sheet as a template for the rest and I simply cut and pasted into the succeeding years. I turned the entire copy red and as I found each property and checked all the details (correcting as needed) I would turn the entry black. I managed to get through all of Bishops Nympton in just two days. I then put all the sheets together in one summation sheet and sorted by surname of occupier and there were my families all neatly listed on their farms for a fifty year period. It allowed me to separate out two family lines that by this time were third cousins and by the time these families emigrated in the mid 1850s (several from each line) they had forgotten their relationship but this chart was going to restore that knowledge. Already all that record gathering had proven to be most worthwhile.

I am continuing with the other parishes in Devon - Landkey, Merton, Molland, Rose Ash and Twitchen.